LinkedOut

Microsoft has the cash to pay hackers to jailbreak its Bing AI, but apparently not enough to keep almost 700 people employed at the Microsoft-owned professional social media platform LinkedIn.

The site is now undergoing its second round of layoffs this year, The New York Times reports. All told, 668 positions are being culled from its “engineering, product, talent and finance teams,” according to a LinkedIn announcement on Monday, adding to the 716 employees who were let go in May from the company, which has about 19,500 personnel around the world.

LinkedIn didn’t explain in detail why so many people were let go, but it’s hard to ignore its parent company’s hard pivot into AI that’s seen it pour billions into the startup OpenAI and remake some of its most iconic products, including Bing, around chatbot language models.

Source: Futurism

I’m no fan of LinkedIn, but I hope those folks find new work at places that value them as something over than fungible tokens.

And I’m wondering now if the mad-cap dash to AI is the last gasp of Microsoft and others as they try to stave off their disruption and eventual demise.